Corpus anarchicum : Political protest, suicidal violence, and the making of the posthuman body
Author
Hamid Debashi
Imprint
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Descript
x, 235 p. ; 24 cm
SUMMARY
This book is a meditation on and an attempt to understand suicidal violence in the immediate context of its most recent political surge: the decade between 2001 and 2011, from the suicidal mission of Muhammad Atta and his band in the United States to the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 in Tunisia. After the former a devastating military strike and occupation of two Muslim countries commenced, and after the latter a massive transnational democratic uprising ensued. Suicidal violence is neither specific to Islam nor peculiar to our time. It has been manifested in practically all cultures and religions and throughout human history. But the suicidal violence we witness today is of an entirely different disposition because the bodies (both of the assailant and of the assailed) on which it is perpetrated are no longer the human body of our Enlightenment assumption. What we are witnessing is in fact the contour of a posthuman body. -- From back cover
CONTENT
Body doubles -- In the absence of the face -- Bodiless faces -- Bordercrossings -- Voice, vision, and veiling -- Corpus amorphous -- Corpus anarchicum -- Conclusion: a postmortem
